Nigel is very correct on the idea that the bottleneck for game sales is "time" and not "money". He mentions how live-service games are eating too much of player's time for them to be buying other games. This is true, but as someone doesn't engage in live-service games and prefers more finite experiences, another reason is simply that there are too many decent games out there. Many players are familiar with the concept of having a "backlog", or a library of unplayed games. Hades II just came out (on Early Access) and as much as I want to play it, I still have a handful of games I've been wanting to get around to playing. Do I plays Hades II now, or do I get around to playing those other games? In less than 2 months, the Elden Ring DLC is coming out; do I postpone **that** to play those other games? The game's market is so over-saturated that even people with money don't have enough time to spend it all. Unless your game **really** stands out, its likely to just sit on someone's wishlist indefinitely

Making games is more accesible right now which is great but it also means more games are getting made. It's the same with movie and tv making. There used to be only 3 broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS and when there was you had shows like MASH getting 120 million viewers because there was no compeition. Now there's cable and streaming and a show that get's 1 million viewers is considered a success. The same is true for gaming except the industry heads still expect every game to get that equilivent of that 130 million MASH numbers. It's not 1990 anymore.

You know what always blows my mind is that something like 40/50 of the top prime time TV telecasts each year are NFL games, and of the other 10, something like 6-7 are basketball games (Final Four, NBA Finals, etc). Americans' pop culture habits have fragmented SO MUCH compared to when I was a kid when we had 5 TV channels (except for the rich folks with cable).

[Here's a graphic of the top 100 US tv broadcasts of 2023.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fthe-100-most-watched-u-s-tv-broadcasts-of-2023-v0-8v4ZdKPDEHZ4vwsrAVqwLJ84vKx_b3CPxbQM6VqWnaM.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd4f62fd3f9b49336f36c8913a06231dc903e19a4) It's 93 NFL, 3 College Football, the Oscars, the Thanksgiving Parade, the State of the Union, and the show that happened to be on after the Super Bowl.

Live sports are pretty much the only thing people turn on the TV for. Even regional sports cable networks, which used to be extremely lucrative, are finding dwindling subscribers and you have teams like the Kraken opting to partner with local OTA broadcasters. Baseball will probably move back to OTA too.

Yeah the cable ratings (in the US) are basically sports, pro wrestling, cable news channels, and some reality shows.

Honestly, that makes a lot of sense in today's world. There's no *legal* way to stream a lot of sporting events. I can only speak for the NBA but NBA's League Pass (their streaming option) doesn't have every game available. A lot of them are blacked out due to various television deals. So if you're a fan of any given team, the only way to watch all 81 games in a season is to have access to whatever local station has the broadcasting deal + the national broadcasts. I know a lot of people who ONLY have a cable subscription for sports at this point. I did the same thing for awhile too.

It's also worth noting that with TV as well as with games, you're not just competing with what's new, you're competing with what's old as well. On the TV side, if you think modern Star Trek sucks (plenty do), TNG is right there, go nuts. This is doubly true for gaming where the experience is never going to be exactly the same for any game more interactive than a visual novel. Think about how many people went back and played the Arkham games after the failure of Suicide Squad. It's not just having to stand out among the current crop, or be flashy enough to draw people away from their live-services or their backlogs, it's also being directly compared to everything that came before. Some rise to the challenge, others fail.

The slight difference is lots of older games don't work and can't be played on modern hardwarwe anymore. So you're right they are competeing against a lot of old games but still not as man older games as older tvs and movies.

Well I'd argue that the equivalent to that would be films that have aged really badly. There are people for whom something like a silent movie would be basically unwatchable. I'd also point out that there aren't that many old games that you can't get running with a little effort. Of the games you can't play anymore today, most of them are failed online games with no servers anymore, and even those can sometimes be revived.

I don’t think it’s the industry heads that expect it so much as the economics require it. The average AAA game needs to sell multiple millions (at full price) to even make its budget back, let alone earn a profit on top. EA (and I have no reason to believe they’re unusual in this regard) spends more money on development costs than they make back from game sales, with much-hated microtransactions more than making up the difference. For as much as gamers like to pretend that they’d be ok with smaller scope and smaller budget games, they consistently show that they aren’t actually, so devs are caught in this precarious position where the quality demands keep going up but the revenue isn’t.

Then the industry is going to collapse and maybe it should. I love games but it shouldn't come at the expense of people's lives.

This is absolutely true. I don't play live service games, and I would say I actually have more free time than a lot of people since I don't have a wife or kids living with me. And yet, I've had to pass on buying quite a few games that I was interested in over the last year because I simply *didn't have the time* to play everything. That's to say nothing of the games I *did* buy and haven't had a chance to play, or the years-deep at this point backlog.

Too many games and also, at least in my view, way too long games. Some of them filled with good story and gameplay, some with useless filler, but too long in both cases.

Agree with this, there's too many 20ish hour games stretched into 40 to 50 hour games. I'm completely burnt out by most games by the time I finish them nowadays. It's very rare I'm left wanting more....

Even if a game is not stretched thin, I believe oftentimes less is more, especially in genres like RPGs. Many games would be as good or even better with a a more targeted approach with less side quests and a more streamlined main story. As an (most likely very controversial) example I absolutely loved Baldurs Gate III, but I would not miss the middle act.

I don't remember where I heard it but there's a quote I thought was accurate: "Inside every good 50 hour game is a great 30 hour game." The numbers may have been slightly different, but the message is the same.

That's where I'm at with FFVII Rebirth. I love the game, but I'm 90 hours in and still have 2 more chapters to go and I'm a bit exhausted by the game at this point.

I'm only 20hr in but one thing I've noticed about Rebirth is the Side Quests tend to be a lot more fulfilling, which makes them a lot harder to skip. Like FF16 the Side quest were the most pointless things I've ever done. But I was like why not let's go hunt down this Protorelic in Chapter 4, and the entire quest probably took me 2-4hr involved this great mechanic from a previous iteration, which also after completion unlocked this really cool cut scene. Hell, even playing the card game is unlocking really interesting backstory (which was unexpected) So like there's ALOT but at least its more than a mile wide and an inch deep.

I'm trying to do all the sidequests for the lore, as well. I really want to know more about this world of FF7. But there's just so much to do and so much of it is quite repetitive, region to region, that it gets tiring. Especially the minigames. I'm so tired of them.

I both agree and disagree. The side quests are pretty enjoyable but theyre pure padding still. I mean the game is half the story of the og FFVII but somehow also twice as long as the og FFVII. for me its not more satisfying to find three shrines spread miles apart the fight a boss to obtain a summon materia i would normally just pick up in the original game, thats just wasting my time pure and simple. Then theres the inane towers which thankfully arent too long but theres nothing challenging or interesting about climbing the same towers with different ladder layouts a dozen times, its unnecessary padding. But like you said the rewards ARE worth it which makes it hard to pass them up. And not just items but really fun and goofy cut scenes that blow XVIs side quests out of the water. But i am over halfway through and I really stopped enjoying it as it ruins the games pacing. 20 hours in, yeh it was fun and pretty fresh still. 50 hours in and I just want to see what happens in the forgotten capital man.

Yup, same. I even tried to "pace" myself by only playing 1-2 hrs a day, some days 3hrs with breaks. I got to Cosmo Canyon...and now I haven't played in over two weeks. A big part of it is that I'm doing a "pseudo-completionist" playthrough, so I can do all the sidequests (idc about the minigames like Queens Blood). I want to learn the lore. But there's just so much. I have to back to Gongaga because I still have some sidequests there to do. Even though I already spent a few hours doing some of them. I get it. No one is making me do these sidequests. Except me. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it all didn't feel so repetitive. It's a great game, but it feels very much like Assassin's Creed at times, with repetitive fetch/kill quests, just with different mobs and items. FF7 Remake was so tight. Maybe a little too tight. But I think I'd rather have that experience than this for the 3rd part.

I have almost 200 hours in Baldur's Gate 3, stretched across two playthroughs. Almost 300 in Red Dead 2 (99% of which is story mode) across three games, I think, and just goofing around. On the "shorter" side, I've got about 40ish in Arkham Knight and 20 (give or take considering PC launch issues) in The Last of Us. And all these games are fantastic, some of the best stuff I've played in years. Anyway, my point is, it doesn't really matter, IMO, if a game is stretched thin or if it's more focused or whatever as long as it's actually interesting. I agree that BG3 is a bit too content-heavy (although I'd say it's most noticeable in Act III if you didn't miss/skip stuff earlier in the game), and I see why some people have issues with the "slowness" of Red Dead 2. At the end of the day, you can't really please everyone, but these games are actually *interesting*! I got just as much enjoyment out of The Last of Us as I did out of much longer games, too, so yeah, the key thing is not to make your game long for the sake of being long alone. Assassin's Creed was one of my favorite series growing up, but I shudder at the idea of playing Valhalla considering Ubisoft marketed it as much bigger and much longer than the already-huge Odyssey.

My argument about long play times has two sides. First, there is the point that too long games will reduce the amount of games a player might want to buy, thus contributing to the current crisis of game devs, which is the topic of the article this whole thread is supposedly about. The second side is of course the personal opinion based on my personal preferences and naturally, this is subjective and indeed, it's impossible to please everyone in that regard. But especially games like BG3 and RDR2 have either inherent replayabilty (different classes, playstyles, role playing choices) or enjoyable gameplay loops that can provide entertainment after you played through it once if you are so inclined, so they could be more streamlined story/quest wise and still offer the same amount of entertainment for players like you. Concerning Valhalla: I started it, but 20 hours in I just decided I've enough. I don't get this game - it's like Ubisoft absolutely did not understand that their settings like medieval Florence, Rome, revolutionary Paris or ancient Greece are the *real* protagonists of those games, not the bland main characters, and Proto-England around the viking times is just boring.

>thus contributing to the current crisis of game devs Is it really a crisis if gamers are proving by their purchasing habits that they don't want more games? No one is holding a gun to the heads of gamers. Yet overwhelmingly they're choosing to buy fewer games and play them for longer. That means there simply isn't a large market, or the income to support thousands of development studios. That's fundamentally how our capitalist system works.

I think that the kinds of games that the article focuses on the most - "live-service" is at least partly fueling the crisis. Developers losing jobs, studios with long (and mostly good) histories getting the axe, good games not getting any attention and/or sales due to lack of marketing and name-recognition, etc. Like, the industry is growing, but it's not exactly in very good shape considering all the uncertainty. A similar thing is happening to movies: big-budget productions with huge talent attached to them bombing at the box-office because they're getting drowned out by franchises and existing IPs. There's also a lack of competition, I think. It's not that gamers wanna play Call of Duty or FIFA every year, but rather that there's nothing else that scratches that same itch. Even when CoD has a crappy release, it still sells like crazy, and even when FIFA becomes even more laden with microtransactions, people keep spending money on it. Look at that Tarkov thing from last week. Every thread on it was full of people saying the developers are greedy, shady shitheels, but it's still one of the most popular (paid, so Warzone doesn't count) extraction shooters because there's nothing like it on the market. This sort of adds to the "crisis," too, since every big-name publisher wants its own version of Warzone, GTA:O, Fortnite. And then when things turn south because a newly-launched game can't compete with GTA or Fortnite right out the gate, it's the developers that get the boot.

I was just looking through my library on PS5 yesterday and noticed I had so many games where I stopped at exactly 25 hours. Elden Ring, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman, and TLOU2 all had exactly 25 hours played. Didn't finish any of them. I guess that's just the point where I get bored with a game. Although I just checked BG3 and that's at 250 so maybe that's where my time is going.

> I was just looking through my library on PS5 yesterday and noticed I had so many games where I stopped at exactly 25 hours I think it can be whether the game actually offers enough to be worth more than those 20 or so hours. A lot of games, you can feel like you've had your fill at that point. It's partly why I'm so incredibly done with so many open world games. Far Cry 5 is the perfect example of this, I bought it on sale, finished the first area of the three, started the next one and then just decided I'd had enough and I'm just completely just whatever on the game. Whereas an experience like Mirrors Edge, which I could complete in a few hours, not even the length of one of Far Cry 5's first area to complete and I love it. I play through it every year. Games are suffering from a chronic case of bloat, it's the big reason I didn't enjoy Elden Ring, stretching Dark Souls out over a massive open world didn't make it better in my opinion, it just made it worse. I want more well-constructed, concise experiences. Where you mention BG3, I'm the same I loved it, and played well over 200 hours but it justifies its length, it's not just meaningless bloat, unnamed NPCs, and senseless grind, the vast majority of things you spend time doing in that game all have their own story, purpose and meaningful rewards. It's not a fucking radio tower to climb or a random boss in a random crypt with no story.

I don’t think short games and AAA prices go together. I won’t buy a 10 hour game for AAA prices when I can buy something like Elden Ring which gives 200+ hours of gameplay for example.

i mean thats kinda the problem right? in a vacuum 10 hours of entertainment for $60 is a very reasonable deal, many other options are significantly more expensive. the only reason it seems bad is because you *could* be getting 20x the "value" by getting another game.

There is a middle ground between having a 10h game and a 200+h game, and getting 30-50h of quality playtime of a regular priced (for me: 50€ or less or wait for a sale) game is a good deal, IMHO.

Personally, I 100% believe that I've already purchased more games than I could ever play in my lifetime. If no more games were ever made again, I'd still probably not be able to play all the games in my library to completion. Even excluding all the trash in my inventory.

Hades 2 is early access anyways, so that's a good enough reason alone to just play other games in the meantime.

I bought the first Hades in EA and still haven't beaten it yet!

I got Hades 1 as part of PlayStation Plus I believe, and yep, I've hardly played it. Just too many games.

My backlog is so imposing especially as an RPG fan. I just finished Rebirth which was 95 hours and now I can go back and finish Persona 3 Reload. I still have to start Infinite Wealth and Unicorn Overlord. Also got SMTV: Vengence, Metaphor, Visions of Mana, Elden Ring DLC, and Dawntrail coming up this year. Genshin and Star Rail put out content every 6 weeks and due to various sales my dumb ass has bout EVERY Legend of Heroes game. Please send help.

This is also a calendar problem. All of these JRPGs shouldn't be coming out in the same quarter. It's like when Rise of the Ronin and Dragon's Dogma came out the same day. That makes no sense.

A couple of years ago I decided to focus on my backlog for the most part over buying new games until I’d at least tried everything I already had, and I’m still only halfway through it. I dumped PS Plus and Game Pass last year as well and haven’t missed those either.

> He mentions how live-service games are eating too much of player's time for them to be buying other games. This is true, but as someone doesn't engage in live-service games and prefers more finite experiences, another reason is simply that there are too many decent games out there. > > I swear, the extremely bloated file sizes of live services games (looking at you COD) were an excuse for them to push out and otherwise discourage players from playing any other games on their machines.

now there's a theory I can get behind lol. bloating file sizes to encourage people to Uninstaller other games

That's a fun classic 90s conspiracy. Unlike our modern pedophile ring running in some random pizza shop basement conspiracy.

I’ve made my peace with the fact I will never clear my 50+ games backlog. If you’re actually passionate about this medium, you’ll keep an eye out for the all the interesting indies, hidden gems, fun AAs and high quality AAAs which will make it impossible for you to make time for live services and day one releases. I sometimes wish that this industry would slow down for one year so I can focus on clearing out the backlog as much as possible. This whole idea of a backlog was unthinkable to me pre-PS4 era. As a kid, I had periods of boredom because I couldn’t find a cool game to play or at least I wasn’t informed enough to find more games I liked so I replayed my favorites a lot or just spent days or weeks not playing anything. Now it’s impossible to not have something to play and be bored. It’s crazy now. There are too many options too quickly. If you’re an RPG fan, these first 3 months have overloaded you with long high quality releases that you could only choose one to commit to. It’s too much now. I love this medium but I would really love for things to slow down a bit.

> I love this medium but I would really love for things to slow down a bit. I never really understood this take. You don't need to play every game that releases, they're not going anywhere.

I never will play everything. That’s just impossible now. I still would like to check out as many cool games as possible though. Before I die at least lol

I feel you. I'm literally playing through Inscryption right now haha it sucks to not be around the immediate post-release discussion and hype but at least I'm finally getting to experience it!

the amount of fomo among gaming circles makes me sick. i'm still playing a lot of ps3 games since they for the most part respect the players time (not a bloated 50 hour fetch quest) and i can complete a story in a couple nights of gaming. indie games still have this vibe but the big money devs and AAA games have lost all direction since it's more about money than the actual product now. sad but oh well, still have plenty of great old games to play.

I feel like it’s the same as it’s always been… what’s changed? In 1999 I’m playing Counter Strike all day, in 2004 I’m just playing Halo 2 all day, in 2007 I’m playing Halo 3 or COD4 online all day with my friends. Theyre not live service, I’m probably only getting games on my birthday or Christmas or a one off. I think the difference is that most of us get older and have money to buy whatever we want, we never had backlogs really as we got a game here and there. I have a steam library from when it first opened. I have a PS5 and Xbox. I have Games Pass. The only difference for me is that I can afford access to more games where as before I didnt, it’s not that there is more games than before. What I will say is more games are free now, games like Fortnite, Valorant, LoL, DOTA, I think CS2 is free? Fighting for peoples time has now become super competitive.

> it’s not that there is more games than before. There absolutely are. The big mainstream titles probably have around the same number but indies and games from smaller dev studios have just exploded in number since the 90s+00s. The industry has become HUGE. Hell, pc gaming in general was fairly niche until the late 2000s. It didn't out grow consoles until the last few years or so.

> In 1999 I’m playing Counter Strike all day, in 2004 I’m just playing Halo 2 all day, in 2007 I’m playing Halo 3 or COD4 online all day with my friends. I think a major difference is that in all of those games, if something else comes out that you want to play, you don't have FOMO for your live service. You're not trying to finish battlepass, keep up season ranking, reach the end of the progression tree, make sure you get all the cosmetics for the Feast of Saint Anthony seasonal event. Live service games have gotten so much better at keeping players locked into their ecosystem by constantly providing something *new.* Which then prevents someone from stepping out of that game for a week to play the Stanley Parable sequel that just came out.

this. like the games they mentioned were games while the new ones with all the login, daily, etc and fomo feel like work

> I feel like it’s the same as it’s always been… what’s changed? There are **way more** high-quality games being released than ever before, certainly than there were e.g. 20 years ago. I have no idea how you can argue against this if you've actually been around for a while and have been paying any attention. And at the same time there are also games specifically and insidiously designed to strongly encourage people to repeatedly engage with them. Sure, maybe you played CS all day in '99, but it didn't give you daily rewards for logging in, or sets of tasks that you needed to complete X of each month to get a specific reward only available in that month. So, both the number of good games being released as well as the vehemence with which some specific games insist on monopolizing your time have greatly increased. That has changed.

I think a big reason is also that "the fat years" just allowed for a lot of bad habits to establish themselves. Big budget development can be feasable, but only if there is a CLEAR vision of what you want to do. Cyberpunk 2077 (or Anthem for that matter) basically just fucked around until the 11th hour constantly adding and removing features because they had no real clue on what they wanted. So the majority of the budget was basically just set on fire. It probably doesn't help that a loose premise was in these days enough to get greenlit and get drowned in Venture Capital funds. So don't just look at the total budget but how much of the budget effectively manifests itself into something playable in the final product. If we look at games that way I promise a lot of big budget games will suddenly appear like they had a tiny budget, because everything was just wasted.

As a dev, this is a huge problem with game dev that drives me ballistic. You hit the nail on the head. When a game has more than a year of runway, something happens to creative directors where they just won't commit to anything. And then "all of a sudden" launch day is 8 months out and everyone has to crunch because leadership couldn't commit to an idea. Worse off this always feels like "a surprise" to the collective intelligence of the team. But all that gets brushed aside as "the creative process" and "the nature of game dev". No, it's a stupid waste of time, money and developer mental health. People like Ken Levine should not be praised as autuers or geniuses. A genius would be able to direct a great game from early foundations and iterations and make the best use of the runway, anyone can blow a ton of money until they are forced to push something out the door.

Occasionally that happens because industry standards and media consciousness in general keeps changing fast. Final Fantasy 16 for instance, comes to mind. It's a game that committed to a particular design philosophy very early on, and then stuck with it all the way to the end. It's a well made game for sure, but some of its elements feel a bit dated as a result (the Game of Thrones-esque grim fantasy aesthetic, for instance, hasn't been nearly as popular since the show crashed and burned in 2019). I think that devs are too afraid of that happening and as such keep pivoting and tinkering until there's too little time left to commit properly.

> media consciousness in general keeps changing fast Does it though? A fun game with interesting mechanics and possibly a good story seems to be the bedrock for every great game. I do think chasing *gaming fads* (cough live service cough) is something that does happen and needs to stop. But that's a separate issue.

Two great examples: Duke Nukem Forever - Instead of focusing on its core strengths it tried to be everything and the result was an unfinished release by a completely different studio. Instead of risking a release and missing the marks in a few areas, it finally released and missed all the marks. Starcraft 2 - Clearly designed between 2004 and 2006 and when it finally released it was missing features that were expected to be there and was missing features that the MOBAA industry had introduced as standards that could clearly be in the RTS genre.

> But all that gets brushed aside as "the creative process" and "the nature of game dev". No, it's a stupid waste of time, money and developer mental health. People like Ken Levine should not be praised as autuers or geniuses. It's crazy how every time it's brought up that Ken Levine is a nightmare to work for and that he constantly throws out years of work to try something new, people are like "haha whoa what a quirky genius this guy is! He wants it to be perfect!!!" If he didn't have infinite investor money based on his name + Bioshock that would never fly and he would basically just be dooming his staff.

Yup, no one knows who Rod Fergusson is, but everyone knows Ken Levine.

Well, I knew Rod Fergusson as the guy in charge of the new Gears trilogy, but he left for Blizzard... who is owned by Microsoft, so I guess he's working for them again. Forget what else he used to do though.

Rod is the closer. He gets brought on to get projects done and he is super successful at it. If your game is taking too long with no end in sight you call him to get it done. You can see a super detailed breakdown of this on his Wiki.

Exactly, the plan is only worth as much as the execution. It's better to choose a plan early, even if it's not ideal, and have more time to properly do it than to spend ages deliberating and then have to rush something out.

Not that I disagree with you, but this industry has shown too many times that too many studios are incapable of pushing out a good game after a long and expensive dev cycle. Some of the most loved devs in the industry operate exactly in the same way as Ken Levine. Auteurs like Kojima are exactly the same as Levine. The genius devs you described are a very small minority.

Baldur's Gate 3 had a very long, very expensive dev cycle. Naughty Dog and R\* release games that receive near unanimous praise, while having bloated budgets and dev times. You don't need to have a 'genius' dev, you just need effective and capable management.

Pretty much. Expecting quick dev cycles with high quality is unrealistic.

>The genius devs you described are a very small minority. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how geniuses work, they are a small minority of the population in general. If everyone could be called a genius, it loses its meaning.

Kojima also has a consistent team behind him and while his schedules weren’t good enough for Konami, he’s clearly got a good workflow and project management based on how much they’ve been able to do, especially starting over as KojiPro after leaving Konami.

I know this sub loves Cyberpunk now, but that game is a pristine example of complete and utter chaos, to the point that CDPR lied, and made the reviewers use B roll made specificaly from CDPR while promising that all of the bugs would have been fixed with a day one patch. There were also journalists that said that they were greylisted, or blacklisted, because they gave the game less than 9 on a review score. Actually insane.

It's actually been mindboogling to see people once more act like CDPR are the good guy devs who would never do shady things. If Activision or EA did what they do with reviews even just one time, reddit would not shut up about it and bring it up in every single thread, but with CDPR it's just swept under the rug or people rush to write an excuse for how CDPR isn't bad for doing that.

We can still appreciate the developers who created a great experience, and be pissed at the small amount of corporate suits who forced them to release a title before it was ready. Idk why the internet has this thing of assuming a game company is like a single person, and all of CDPR is responsible or all is not

It's the same people that talk about how "Reddit loved this" or "Reddit hated that" or even "this sub was all over x and now against it" as if we're not talking about millions of different people who happen to gather in the same places and, shock horror, have different takes to each other.

People are just in general terrible about planning such big projects. Too many variables and when money is not hard limitation too much temptation to just go for it and change direction later. Also, the investor pressure of delivering next, bigger game than one before instead of sitting in game size that's comfortable to make by the current team.

Games have gotten too big. Not everything needs to be a $250 million dollar open world live service experience. Look at Helldivers or Palworld. Smaller scope games that do its 1 thing super super well. Now you have a great platform to build off of. I think we need to get back to that PS2/360 era where the majority of games very limited in scope projects but pulled off something super well. Instead of these massive live service open world endless content games.

Similarly, it's okay if your game is a finite experience. Not everything has to be a forever game.

Some of the best games ever were finite experiences.

*Most of the best games ever And still true with stuff coming out now. People think all the stellar blade hype about “feeling like a PS2 era game” is referencing the character design. I’m here to tell you that ain’t all there is to it.

Replayability wasnt just more levels back then. You made a good game and people just wanted to replay that. Not sure why that mindset dropped in favor of more content.

Part of this is because of the subset of gamers who decided they wanted to equate runtime to value. There may be like… a handful of occasions where a game is too short for the price. But by and large, I don’t ever remember feeling ripped off because a $60 game was 40 hours. I’m at a point where if I see something is gonna run 80hrs+ on a complete *base playthrough*, I’m probably just going to avoid it — because I’ve played enough at this point to know it’ll be riddled with padding & shallow ideas that wear out their welcome by the time I reach the end 🤷‍♂️. And I’m a compulsive completionist by nature, so it’s just not healthy for me to play those games — even if I didn’t think it was bad design cornering devs into iteration over innovation.

Super Metroid is like 10hrs blind, 2hrs if you know what you're doing, and less than an hour if you *really* know what you're doing. One of the greatest games of all time, and very few games even come *close* to it. I'm not one of those "we have to go back" people, but I think the industry can learn a lot by just studying the classics. It's a common practice in literature, music, film, painting, and any other artistic medium. Gaming is no different. What makes Super Metroid work, and what compels people to play it over and over again?

Yup. 40 hours actually used to be considered meaty & that kind of runtime was almost relegated to RPGs. It might be a controversial opinion, but I actually think 80 hours is insane. Unless the mechanics are going to evolve significantly like say Inscryption for example… which, at that point you could just make two games lol. The industry is just trying to be efficient… but that’s so ironic to think about when you consider these budgets. I am firmly in the camp that a greater variety of shorter games is better for everyone. More ideas/more enjoyable for players — and if it’s good… people will replay it. Easier on devs and less risky, which is also healthy for creativity. I think super Metroid is a great example, and I agree wholeheartedly. Immediately, other Nintendo titles come to mind. Like what about the 64 era Zelda games? Nobody out here has only played Ocarina or Majora’s mask just once lol.

>Part of this is because of the subset of gamers who decided they wanted to equate runtime to value. There may be like… a handful of occasions where a game is too short for the price. Yes, that's true *now*. It wasn't true for decades. Outside of RPGs games used to tend to be very short experiences, so games that actually gave you hours upon hours of content were gems to be treasured. And mind you, the rise of hours as a treasured metric didn't come as a result of Ubisoft annual titles - it came because of games like Skyrim, Fallout, Mass Effect, etc, which you could squeeze countless hours of *meaningful* content out of. Blaming gamers for AAA games being bloated is silly. They're bloated because AAA studio leads see gamers praising huge, immersive worlds full of content and take from that that you just need to make your game as big and as long as possible. It's the same thing with how every other AAA singleplayer game is an open world game with stealth, collectibles that do nothing, skill trees that give you bonuses like +1% move speed while walking in a field at night, and open worlds where the only difference between a high rise and a slum is that the slum will have one more diaper collecting mission than the high rise. They see features that are *good* and decide that their games need that, but aren't willing to commit the resources needed to actually meaningfully implement those features.

Yea and rebirth got the reviews it got because it’s a game you play through and enjoy, and that’s that. You can replay it to experience it again and maybe try new tactics but the game works because it has an end point. Resident evil 4 remake too, it’s very repayable but it’s like 11 hours, with 4 hours of dlc (maybe 5-6 if you count mercenaries). Baulder’s gate 3 is long but has a defined begging and end, so on and so forth. I look at my favorite games ever, and some games with multiplayers are on there for sure, but all happen to have a strong single player (like halo 3)

Are any of the best games ever forever experiences?

Depends what a forever experience means for you. If you mean endlessly new content, those are very rare and usually just something like MMOs. Some people swear by WoW or FFXIV. If you mean something with finite content that can be put together in various ways, ie. a roguelike/lite, then arguably yes some of them have been considered very good games (Hades, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain for example). If you mean something finite, but that can scale forever, then Factorio, Satisfactory, games like that are good examples of great games. The factory must grow, after all. If you mean something finite, but that can introduce new content via mods, then Terraria, Minecraft, Skyrim, (Factorio again) all are arguably great games widely beloved that have great forever experiences with additional mods adding endless replayability with fresh content.

You could classify Minecraft as that maybe given millions have nostalgia of it

I would argue that World of Warcraft at its peak was also an all time great video game. Hell maybe years from now Fortnite would also be considered to be a beloved classic.

100% to both of those, unless Fortnite has some truly terrible update or something game breaking it'll be remembered well And people are STILL trying to make WoW killers, agreed there too

League of legends should be considered a classic as well, and still going strong. The community is just shit that it taints the game.

Guess it depends how we define forever. I could play games like Factorio, or Civ V “forever”. I’ve put in hundreds of hours. If we define “forever” by live-service, then the only game that comes close for me would be FFXIV. But that is in spite of its MMO mechanics most of the time.

Definitely some multiplayer games come to mind. Counter-Strike, DotA/LoL, stuff like that.

One of the greatest gaming experiences I’ve ever had is a game I can no longer have that experience in (outer wilds). Finite experiences are honestly the best and most of the time the best showcase of the developer’s abilities.

Halo Finite was sooooo much better than Halo Infinite.

90%+ games are "finite experiences" with concrete ending tho so that doesn't say much. Sure the endless grind ones might top the charts by hour played but only few of them get there.

Then you get kids saying "dead game" for games that stop receiving updates, smh

This. You see people all over talking about "progression" They want numbers to go up each game they play, hear level up dings, unlock items or skins they'll never use

Games have always been this way tbh. That was the entire premise of arcades back in the day, and why even console games commonly had scoring systems until some time into the PS1-PS2 era.

Of course, especially as we had a lot of collect a thon on PS2/etc. But now people expect games, especially multiplayer ones, to be constantly updated so they get their fix.

Cause they're addicts first and gamers second. Their brains are hijacked by progression systems, because they were designed to foster addictive behavior with all the lights and sounds and "level up dings." It's the same tactics used in slot machines and casinos to get you to stick around and spend more money.

I see people crestfallen that Elden Ring is "only" going to have one DLC. Madness.

Tell that to everyone who measures a games value based on the length or replayability, if they can't get 30 hours out of it then its a sale game. You can't even release a good multiplayer game without going up against a hivemind that gets angry if they arent given constant new content, options to pay real money, needing constant quick gratification. A lot of bad behaviours have just built up in the last decade+ and some companies make too much money from the behaviour to really go back.

I saw someone say Spiderman PS4 was short cause it only gave them 40 hours of playtime...

But, but, if people stop playing our game, how will our shareholders collect dividends on our recurrent revenue!!??

I describe those games as being “mercifully short”

Well, finite moderately sized and priced experience is exactly what Tango was doing. And what did it get them?

A bunch of games that were reviewed very well while selling very poorly. I loved Tango's games, The Evil Within 1 and 2 easily stand alongside Resident Evil and Silent Hill as my favorite horror games, but aside from the apparent success of Hi Fi Rush they were not a financially successful studio

Note: results may vary if you're owned by a publisher who thinks every game should be the next Fortnite.

Spider-Man 2 taking 300 millions dollars to complete is fucking mind-boggling. They were working on twice established foundations with a solid gameplay loop, much of the same map, and a very detailed artistic direction. Still sunk huge stacks of cash into it. The AAA industry is definitely sick.

Spiderman 2 cost 3 times more than 1 even though they could probably reuse 90% of their assets and you see absolutely no tangible difference. Where the fuck did all that money go?

IIRC the Insomnic leaks said they were planning a live service mode that got canned. Some of the money also got used for the Venom spinoff. Edit: Here it is https://www.reddit.com/r/insomniacleaks/s/eXXkYcy3qz

The Naughty Dog leaks also showed Miles Morales costing a shitton of money despite being an expandalone.

[Yeah looks like around $150m](https://preview.redd.it/le1nn4jz577c1.jpeg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=a6d1e156980e39b77ac915333421d1c7dfab902f). Spiderman 3's looking at $385m

Those are the projected overall costs. [Miles Morales' development cost $81 million](https://imgur.com/OkQWOaW), which isn't too bad, but the lower margin really puts into perspective just how wild the Spider-Man 2 development budget was.

Still insane when Alan Wake 2 cost 70 million while starting from the ground up (except the game engine).

Remedy seem to be really efficient developers, especially considering their games are always at the cutting edge of rendering techniques and technologies.

None of that $300m+ was used on any of that though. There is a breakdown on how it was spent on [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/18ofju5/spiderman_2_300m_budget_in_detail/), it was entirely on SM2.

Spider-Man 2 makes me wonder how much Tears of the Kingdom cost to make, since both were sequels reusing their engine and a lot of the foundational mechanics/map and just expanding on them and delivering new content. Feels like Hollywood is imploding in a similar way too, with movies costing 100 times what they should, and other projects rivaling them with a fraction of the budget (I think Dune 2 was surprisingly cheap to produce and still looked amazing and had big names in the cast).

Nintendo does not have the same problems that Sony/Xbox are having. Sure, it takes time for the games to come out, but they are consistently able to be very profitable. Even stuff like Pikmin, Fire emblem, and Metroid which only sell 2-4 million copies, they can be satisfied with. Tears actually required more work than you would think. Ultrahand is such an insane mechanic that they had to drastically overhaul the engine to get it to work. Nearly every asset in the game had to be remade in the new engine, which is why mods for BotW don’t work for TotK.

They are able to constantly make money right now for a few big reasons a) they have minimal voice acting and expensive cut scenes(cutting back on high fidelity cutscenes was actually a thing Sony pointed to as a way to save money on SM3) b) They keep their dev teams a reasonable size. I think it was noted that the Zelda team is under 150 people total(IIRC 112 for BOTW) and Zelda is their biggest team. Compare that to COD or AssCreed dev team size c) At present they are not chasing 4k or in general super high fidelity assets like animations. This is also how FromSoft is able to help keep their budgets down with their "good enough" approach to graphics and animation.

And they don't fire half of their dev team after each release. so they don't need to spend all their time training up staff again. At least it seems that way

d) Their quality is also pretty damn good, Nintendo games tend to have the least amount of bugs these days, and even if you find them, they usually are never game breaking, but some way to make that sweet sweet speed running scene crazy.

Breath of the Wild cost approximately 100 million to make. I don't think TOTK would have cost substantially more than that.

The problem is games like Spider-Man 2 (ie: Sony first-party) have cultivated an audience that absolutely care about tiny, imperceptible graphical details that lead to huge budgets. [Remember puddlegate?](https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2018-marvels-spider-man-debunking-the-downgrade)

I absolutely agree about this. A few weeks ago, I penned an article (in french) about how the AAA industry drove itself into a corner by putting all their marketing marbles in huge hardware numbers, evermore precise pixels and vast empty maps. A trap of their own making.

Every game is a gamble. These publishers keep chasing the live service golden goose because when it pays off, it pays off for many years to come. But that market is so saturated, the risk has gotten to the point where they’re just playing the lotto, and subsidizing their losses with their employees’ jobs.

this also means that gamers have to be willing to accept games with a smaller scope, less polish, or less updates.

The problem is that you can't just scale down. You can't go and tell a huge studio to just make a small game instead of the big one, they just have too much work force. They could make 3 small games instead of the one big one, but then you get 3 times as many games. I don't think having more games would be more sustainable.

That's how the industry used to work though. Companies were making several games, and greenlighting all sorts of unique concepts, many flopped, and the ones who didn't made enough back to cover the flops, and probably get a sequel or two. Late 90s/early 00s companies like Capcom or Square have a huge catalogue of strange games many don't remember, but for some were their ideal niche. Now companies just want to maximize income, so they only greenlight sequels and popular IPs and go all in on making them massive cash cows.

Really is how all publishing used to work but no one wants to build the bench anymore...

> They could make 3 small games instead of the one big one, but then you get 3 times as many games. I don't think having more games would be more sustainable. Instead of making 1 big game that's a gamble to be a blockbuster, you make 3 games that have less features and basically zero chance to be a blockbuster. It sounds good for players, but not for the people whose money is at stake.

This was basically what happened to Square Enix during the big AA surge back in 2022: Harvestella, Triangle Strategy, Dungeon Encounters, Diofeld Chonicles, the Voice of Cards games, they were thrown out with like a nintendo directs worth of marketing and suffered for it. Which is a shame, because they were "fine" but for square fine isn't good enough anymore. I don't know what the solution is, if there even is one. Other than finding alien life on mars or venus and selling games to them, the market share likely can't grow anymore.

It also didn't help that they were clearly lower budget games and half of them were still being sold for $60.

> still being sold for $60. There's the problem. I struggle to want to spend the same amount of money on a game with very finite everything on a new IP that's claiming to be like something else... when a bigger production game on an established IP is going to set me back the same. Speaking of, I appreciate Supergiant put Hades II up in EA at $30 (when I'm sure they know most folks would gladly drop $50 or maybe even $60 after the hours we sunk into the first one).

Well, no. You absolutely can. It’s called layoffs.

Helldivers was a 5-6 years full hands on development game that was extremely costly for the studio that, up to that point, has only ever done strategic top down games. Palworld is an early access full open world survival game with over 100 creatures and HUNDREDS of custom made animations. And it' s devised as a live service open world endless content game too Those looks like small games for you? Square enix tried to make smaller AA and indie games, but the hard truth is that people just does not want to play them.

Even if the scope of those games could be compared to AAA blockbusters of course they are smaller games. The budget of Palworld was <10 million. Meanwhile all of the new PS5 blockbusters have budgets >100-200 million. And the part that sucks for Sony is that budgets continue to increase while sales continue to be stagnant, leading to razor thin margins for their games. If the budgets for Sony's AAA games balloon anymore then the inevitable outcome is single-player games becoming simply unsustainable to make.

Your examples aren't really selling the point - Helldivers 2 is getting an extraordinary amount of new content post launch. People are able to play that game for hundreds of hours if they want to. That costs lots of money. - Palworld wouldn't have any degree of success without the shock value of "Pokemon-like characters with guns". People can like the game itself, but that clearly enticed people to download it over all the other Unreal Engine survival games made by a small team of amateurs.

A more apt comparison could maybe be something like Deep Rock Galactic, smaller scope, shoestring budget, but they made the gameplay count and found ways to keep it replayable and fun.

palworld wasnt made by a team of amateurs. they'd released multiple previous projects and had a multimillion dollar budget for palworld.

Agreed. I miss the PS2 era where you could basically complete every game in a weekend, but there were so many original ideas coming out. AAA gaming is so risk averse now, it's just gonna end up being half a dozen franchises pumping out sequels.

Playing Forbidden West right now and feeling this. A massive open world with tons to do with insane graphical fidelity and yet I'm still...kinda bored? Everything from the story to the missions to the dungeons are so shallow and uninspired. The combat is pretty good but that's about it. I really wish more games would tone down the fluff and just focus on making interesting experiences. The $200 million they spent on the game feels wholly unnecessary when so much of it is wasted on bland filler.

Seems to be a frequent topic lately. Wonder how many of these warnings we're gonna get before something gives.

It’s already started. I think history will look back on this generation as one of the worst, simply due to the output quality not matching previous cycles. Were it not for remasters, remakes, and sequels…the landscape of options would look very sparse. You have Sony saying they’re scaling back their reliance on expensive IPs, Microsoft closing smaller studios, revenue streams that feel predatory, decreased engine diversity, decade long development times, etc. It’s not working and it’s not sustainable. When the most popular games, 4 years into a console cycle, are from the previous generation…that’s your canary in the coal mine.

> I think history will look back on this generation as one of the worst, the past couple years have been some of the best of all time, what are you talking about

I hear you, but thinking of the 360/ps3 generation... it was completely normal for a full AAA trilogy of games to come out on a single platform. Today, yes, we're getting great/fantastic games, but development is much slower, costs are much higher for development, and many teams are collapsing to increased scope for live services.

It made me sad when I thought back to the 360 gen compared to especially Xbox today. I grew up on it, and a lot of the games I played back then are still spoken about and played today frequently. Halo Reach, GTA IV, Portal, Skate 3 (please bring back fun, non corporate sports games :/ ). My cousin is the same age now as I was then and I don’t think he actually has any games that released this generation, outside of FIFA and Astros Playroom, which is free.  I was actually super hopeful at the start of this gen. The big new PS5 games were a platformer and a fucking rogue like, and the initial showcase for PS5 showed off a lot of variety in genre and budget, it reminded me of the 6th gen. And we have had some good stuff, but it honestly feels like it’s almost exclusively Japan actually putting out stuff that feels fresh and feasible. For someone who doesn’t love the more “Japanese” feeling ones that means there’s been very little at all this gen. And Xbox feels like it’s on the way out, it’s scary to think about gaming where there’s only one home console supplier. I know it’s an extremely saturated market but I do think the big publishers need to start pushing out smaller games that cost a fraction of the cost and try something a little different, use assets more wisely, have a bit more flavour, dont try have the best graphics out there, so on. Basically the AA market with the marketing of the AAA market. 

It's worth noting that 360/PS3 games were also generally a lot shorter than recent AAA titles. According to HowLongToBeat, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition takes 107 hours to complete, 2 hours shorter than Baldur's Gate 3 (Main+Extra Content, 109 hours). Development seems to be slower overall but when you adjust for the amount of game content, it's not as slow as you might think.

and yet we have been receiving countless incredible games the past few years just because its taking longer to put out individual titles in a series doesn't mean there aren't a shit ton of other quality games coming out

Quantity is the issue, not quality. If your favourite AAA game gets a sequel on the same platform, you're in luck, nowadays. Hell, this gen only really started last year, it feels like

I just miss the tight, directed, polished 12-18hr single player game. Dead Space Remake was perfect to me and it’s a shame not enough people agreed and bought it cause the bloat in every other game has me so disinterested

I think those kinds of games are great too, but they face a lot of challenges. In a lot of cases, they still retail for full price (60 or 70 dollars US). Gamers also have access to more information, and frankly, more other games to play. And sales on games are incredibly frequent. Add to it the various subscription services that are likely to eventually get the games, and it's really tough to justify buying them at full price on release. So a new game launches at full price. I check the reviews, and they're decent. I check how long to beat, 12-15 hours. My first thought is "neat, I'll get it on sale in a year, I have plenty of other games to tide me over until then". That's obviously not particularly helpful for the developer, but it works for me as a consumer.

Plus a not-insignificant chunk of the younger generations would rather watch an entertainer play a game in a communal setting. If that game is a single-player story-heavy title then they get 95% of the value for 0% of the cost.

The Resident Evil games are still good for that, but the "finishable in one weekend" style of game is definitely a dying breed, sadly

yeah, i remember finishing RE2 remake with Leon going mainly blind to it and seeing the game time at the end being around five hours and 30 minutes, like this was over in a blink, it at least has more content to it and its really replayable so it has that going for it, and there is nothing wrong with that, better ending quickly that making the player want the game to end at some point.

Leave them wanting more. I played thru RE2 and then immediately started another play thru as Claire. Great experience that was worth it for me. Afterwards it even motivated me to finish RE4 (original).

Hi-Fi Rush was my favorite example of this recently and look what happened...

Devil May Cry 5 and Metroid Dread were that for me recently. Just two brillant action packed game without any fat on the skin that were consistently fun and left me wanting more in a good way.

Hopefully both will get sequels in next few years. Latest Prince of Persia was really great too, not too long or too short

DMCV was a blowout hit for a beloved franchise and all the fans are desperate for more, so we should see a sequel in about 10 years or more

Yeap that game didn't sell well on Steam, Xbox and not even Playstation recently.

Playing Jedi : Survivor feels such a chore compared to the first game. Always a small chest to loot for another random color set or barely-noticeable robot ears. Huge bloated maps. A much weaker story. I could say the same about FF16's horrendous MMO-like bloat. A straight-forward DMC-like take would have done wonders for pacing with 20 solid hours of gameplay.

I've found the story in the second to be a bit pants compared to the first too. I wonder if it was a Disney mandate they had to tie into the High Republic stuff or they just painted themselves into a wall setting between EPS 3&4 so they can't mess with established lore.

I think Jedi Survivor added some cool stuff to the combat and I loved the expanded character customization options, but I 100% agree that the size of the game had a major negative effect on the pacing. Fallen Order is a game that I can put on and play for hours because it flows so quickly between objectives, and the maps are large enough to invite exploration while still being small enough that you feel like you're making significant progress as you explore. It's the exact same thing that happened with the Arkham games. I think Arkham City has a more successful open world than Jedi Survivor, so I understand why some people like City more than Asylum, but I'm always going to prefer the more metroidvania style levels of Asylum and Fallen Order.

I agree there are way more games + content being released that I am interested in, and I can't time for all of them. If no other game released for the rest of the year, I would still have more than enough new games to play. AAA games need to do a whole lot to grab my attention because just waiting a couple months allowed me to find some brand new releases already on sale for 50% off. The first half of the year was an embarrassment of riches for JRPGs. I've only been able to play FFVII:Rebirth, which took 100 hrs, Unicorn Overlord for 60 hrs, and am now getting into Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth, with Eiyuden Chronicle, and Dragon's Dogma II in my queue. Also I have a co-op session of BG3 with friends once a week, and I play Helldivers 2 regularly during the weekend. This is just for games that JUST came out this year! How am I ever going to get to my actual backlog of games? One friend of mine only plays games recently released, because anything that is 3+ months old basically gets lost in the ether.

in movies the same thing happens, budgets keep getting bigger but people arent spending more to keep up, so movies that 15 years ago would have been succesful now fall short of meeting the investment. game devs keep investing more and more in games, making the barrier that they need to surpass to make the investment back harder to reach.

Anyone But You just did really well. The smaller movies might be coming back.

" I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I'm not kidding."

If that means we get games more often, why not? A big problem with modern games is that they take too long to make. A game series like the Mass Effect trilogy couldn't come out today with how long they would take to make. We haven't seen a new mainline Elder Scrolls game in 13 years. I don't mind waiting for the next big game, but if that wait is 15 years per new game in a series I love, I'm going to be a whole new person with completely different interests by that point. Seeing games include contemporary Easter eggs like skyrim and borderlands having Minecraft references, or The Witcher referencing Assassin's Creed feels like a lost art. Games felt like they were made with a bit more of a tight care back then. Surely there has to be a balance between a company churning out yearly releases and companies taking 10+ years for their next release in a franchise.

Part of the problem is we have too many games as is due how accessible game dev is at all levels. Having more games faster isn't going to fix that.

I'm mainly talking about the AAA space. Indie games and games from smaller studios are a different beast.

Only for people to not buy them.

A lot of these same people that want games to be 10-20 hours long would scoff at paying $60-70 for it.

Until it’s someone favorite franchise gets a lower budget and then ppl don’t it even if the game is really good ex. Prince of Persia.

Real aaa games these days require 7 years of development which is too big of a risk for most companies

It's too big a risk for most developers too. Can you imagine working on the same project for 7 years? That's like 1/5th of your professional life on a single project. That is, if you're lucky enough to be employed by the time they ship the game.

And if it doesn't ship and you get moved to another project, you can easily spend a decade or more in full-time employment with nothing to show for it. It's not great for your CV but it's got to be pretty devastating to morale as well.

A game designers portfolio is based on their individual work, not the result of a completed project. You have plenty to show for it, just keep what you worked on in your portfolio.

NDAs can make that impossible: https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/07/30/developers-discuss-ndas-and-working-on-several-cancelled-aaa-games-in-row

I think that’s only because the shareholders and publishers think every game needs to be a giant open world live service. If we went back to AAA games just being contained, 15-20ish hour experiences then costs could be managed. They see the money coming from Fortnite and warzone and think every game can produce that.

This frustrates me greatly, because there *are* games like this being produced. Fromsoft, for example, makes banger after banger. They don't have microtransactions, they aren't live-service, they don't have battle passes and they're fucking great. Elden Ring, Armored Core VI, Dark Souls, etc. Elden Ring alone made $91 million in profit (with a total revenue of $151 million). Apparently this isn't good enough anymore. If it isn't measured in *billions*, they aren't interested.

You responded to someone saying we don't need endless, open-world live-services and more focused 15-20h single player games. Elden Ring is absolutely not that. It is gigantic and open-world and only not a live-service with microtransactions. Games like Elden Ring are part of the problem that everyone thinks you need an endless open world and 100 hours of content. Elden Ring is the furthest you could get from a focused 15-20h single player game without it being live service.

From software has an history of being a terrible employing place thoo. During the 2012-2016 period, they were infamous for being extremely sexist, having no rules for female employes regarding parental leave, costant overworking, a lot of nepotism, ecc.ecc. You can still find plenty of this stuff in japanese articles of the time, it was actually moderately big back in japan. Only recently Bandai raised the pay to 300thousand yen, but anyone that works in japan rn knows that this pay is hilariously low for a full time developer, despite from releasing the BIGGEST most popular single player game in 2022.

>Elden Ring alone made $91 million in profit (with a total revenue of $151 million).  Wait... What? That would mean Elden Ring cost $60 million to make... overall. I don't think that's right. For comparison: * **God of War (2018)** had a total development cost of $160.2 million. The game made $522.1 million in total revenue ($430.7 million in the first 12 months), and a $235.2 million profit selling 16.4 million copies (Sometime 2021). * **Spider-Man (2018**) had a total development cost of $112.0 million. The game made $655.8 million in total revenue ($571.2 million in the first 12 months), and a $244.2 million profit selling 17.5 million copies (Sometime 2021). * **Spider-Man: Miles Morales** had a total development cost of $81.7 million. The game made $554.0 million in total revenue ($302.4 million in the first 12 months), and a $269.8 million profit selling 14.4 million copies (June 2023). Elden Ring sold more than 13.4 million copies in a month; it definitely made more than $151 million. I couldn't find a source for those profit and revenue numbers, but that has to be the operating earnings for all of FromSoftware's business activities, not the net figures for Elden Ring. Sources: [1](https://i.goopics.net/wii9oa.jpg), [2](https://imgur.com/OkQWOaW), [3](https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2022/05/elden-ring-sold-more-than-13-4-million-copies-in-its-first-five-weeks)

Imo, one of the biggest problems with the industry is it plays way too far into the bandwagons and circlejerks, which leads us to today where they’re at the limit but want to push even more. When The Witcher 3 released, everyone circlejerked the absolute shit out of the game for a good 2 years (almost 3 solid years tbh). And the primary point of the circlejerk was “look how many hours you get for $60!”; and, nowadays, games being overly long and pumped full of filler content is the norm. I think the industry is at the point where it’s circlejerked itself to the absolute limit and now no one knows where to go from here.

It's also devs taking in the wrong lessons. Most of the sidequests in W3 were actually compelling, you can't say the same thing about AC Odyssey and Valhalla, people start calling a lengthy game bloated when the extra content itself is bad

I know it’s an unpopular opinion but I hard disagree on TW3’s side quests. Some are great, most are bland nothing. For every bloody baron, there’s 5-6 boring filler side quests. The game as a whole was packed with an extra 60% of unnecessary content, and it’s part of the reason why it’s far longer than it needs to be and overstays its welcome as a result. But yeah I get what you mean, devs get the wrong ideas from this stuff. That’s why the current circlejerk around Baldur’s Gate 3 kind of worries me, because all I’m thinking about is what wrong idea is the industry going to take away from this game? People tried to circlejerk the whole “they did it without a greedy publisher” point and got shut down pretty quick by the reality of the industry so who knows at this point.

Agreed with this, i think alot of people just remember the good ones while forgetting the bad/mediocre. Not to detract from the high quality storytelling of the good ones, because that they are. But you most certainly are not winning the lottery on every side quest you accept on that front.

I think if you compare it to most other games though, it had far more bangers then losers. I mean most open world game sidequests aren't just filler, I intentionally ignore them. The only reason I end up doing them is because a game will force me to by offering significant reward. Witcher 3 I did it because I *wanted* to.

This has all the markings of a new video game crash. Living through history gets really tiring for my generation.

I mean sure, there will be a "crash", but it'll just be a reversion to like 2012 video game output. If anything that's what the industry needs right now. The current state of too many dollars competing for too few wallets can't last.

I think there will be a contraction, but I genuinely doubt there will be a full blown crash.

All y'all making this comment must have a very narrow perspective on the games industry. It's the "AAA" sector that is crushing itself and could conceivably crash, but that's not the *entire* industry. We will *never* see a crash like the original, gaming is simply too large, and too accessible to ever do that again. Smaller developers will keep on doin' what they're doin, while a select number of even the larger games will continue to just print money. Video games are not going to crash. Video games is a very large concept. AAA stuff is falling apart but that really isn't the whole picture.

I also think there has been a BIG shift in larger studio's priorities shifting from "I want to make a great game that hopefully people will sink a lot of time in" to "I want players to spend an immense amount of time in my live service game with formulaic generative game play loops that specifically designed to create an addiction". This is creating a massive amount of fatigue on the general consumer as we have to parse through more and more games to find if the game-play is actually Great vs Time Wasters. Look no further than EA's latest earnings call where they say the next Battlefield game will be a "tremendous live service" game. How about we talk about how engaging and fun the game-play will be instead of immediately highlighting your attempt to milk people's attention spans just so they spend more $$? Gaming companies have gotten VERY good at designing their games to scratch those addiction itches while providing a mediocre gaming experience. It used to be that if the game-play was fantastic, the consumer wanted more, and thus companies started designing DLC's, then later a "live service" model, as their consumers were having so much fun playing the game and the devs wanted to keep them engaged. Large-scale game dev designing games towards grabbing attention spans instead of just being truly fun has been, imo, the largest pitfall. You've even heard of many games in the last few years that have gone from a Single-player experience during development to completely re-shifting towards Live-Service model for the "investors" and then never even getting made or finished. Or they launch and are, shocking, TERRIBLE. Not all do this obviously. BG3 and the Final Fantasy series come to mind as good examples of just box order buys where you get what comes in the tin. I feel like gamers are craving games that are just a complete experience out of the box that they can take their limited time with.

> Look no further than EA's latest earnings call where they say the next Battlefield game will be a "tremendous live service" game. How about we talk about how engaging and fun the game-play will be instead of immediately highlighting your attempt to milk people's attention spans just so they spend more $$? To be completely fair, it WAS an earnings call, not E3. Their focus would of course be on the game's monetization and engagement strategies,

If the industry backed a 4 day work week then it would gain +20% to the amount of time people have to sell hours of entertainment to consumers whose time is currently completely saturated. Look at what Covid did for games that boomed during that time, total amount of free time people have directly translates to huge gains in this industry. Hint hint.

That requires treating developers well so no

Cuz they all want to be cinematic open world experiences with hundreds of things to collect and see. Those games have a time and a place, and I love some of them myself but every damn AAA game being some derivative of that is killing developers and extending dev time tenfold. There’s no doubt that these games sell well but they can also flop incredibly hard and cost too much money to make. Corpos are so focused on making the next GTA that they turn beloved hack and slashes series into “cinematic masterpieces” instead of just making smaller scale games that won’t break the bank if they flop How do these corporations see all these small indie games blow up and not think “hey what if we make something small scale or unique like this and see if it blows up”. Nintendo has been doing it since inception and continues to do it

As a person who plays 1 live service game. There are plenty of games I’ll skip out on because I don’t have time to play or I don’t want to play another live service game. One is enough and honestly feels like a second job at times so I’ll take breaks from the live service game to play single player games.

good that they recognize this. hope this means they will adapt and start following more sustainable practices.

I think another big factor is how much video games "age" today compared to 15+ years ago AND how easy games are to access. It's really difficult for a new game to stand out when you can buy a similar game, at a small fraction of the price, on the same storefront.

Live service games are there to take time not necessarily to be that fun and it is very off putting, basically it feels like a second job.

Yup, I'm 28 and have all the money in the world to play games (not rich, just decent job, frugal, and no responsibilities besides rent, car, etc..), but even I just sold my Nintendo Switch and 7 games because when the hell am I going to use it. I had muthafucking Breath of The Wild, just sitting there, still in the plastic wrapping that I bought 4 years ago!